Scientific advance is driven by intellectual, political, and methodological instruments, not material ones.

Evidence

It can be said in general that the advance of science cannot be materially documented. The history of the sciences can at most be brought alive in the memory, and that not in all cases, through the description of the successive perfecting of the instruments which have been one means of advance and through the description of the machines which have been applications of the science itself. The principal “instruments” of scientific progress are of an intellectual (and even political) and methodological order, and Engels has written 570 that “intellectual instruments” are not born from nothing and are not innate in man, but are acquired, have developed and are developing historically. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1620

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s broader anti-materialist determinism; later Islamophobia work drawing on Gramsci’s hegemony will rely on this same privileging of intellectual/cultural instruments over economic base.